Business Connexion (BCX) has taken the wraps off its public cloud offering, which is set to provide small and medium-sized businesses with the sort of functionality usually reserved for huge enterprises.
Almost three years in the making, BCX’s public cloud offers fully white-labelled solutions that its clients can on-sell to clients of their own. This makes it an enablement channel, not just for NCX, but also for end users, and empowers entrepreneurs to provide services that would previously require enormous manpower and infrastructure.
To this end, BCX is creating a reseller and channel model so that those clients wishing to sell cloud services can provide unprecedented value to their own clients without having to make additional investments in staff or hardware.
While the offering can be branded with a client’s own corporate identity, it can just as easily be sold as a Business Connexion product, which brings with it the added security of knowing that data is housed in BCX’s cutting-edge data centres.
This localisation of the offering is just one of things that sets it apart from other, similar offerings on the market and allows company to preemptively position themselves on the right side of new legislation like the Protection of Personal Information POPI) Act, which has strict stipulations around storing sensitive data within South Africa’s borders. Local hosting and support also means clients will have the option of full support, 24/7.
Because of its inherent flexibility, BCX’s public cloud is able to provide localised, core commodity services to businesses of any size. In addition, because cloud is a dynamic space, additional services will be offered on top of the
core offering to meet clients changing needs.
These additional service offerings will be added in subsequent “storms” of releases. Storm one, which launches today, aims to make it easier for people to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis.
It includes support for locally-hosted Microsoft Exchange – the preferred business email service for most companies – Microsoft Lync a voice and video calibration tool that also provided presence and Microsoft SharePoint, for sharing and collaborating on documents within your own secure intranet It also includes complementary offerings like security and compliance as well as domain registration and a comprehensive payment gateway (supplied in partnership with PayGate).
Because BCX’s aim is to improve and empower businesses, the new public cloud offering also includes an automated migration service, making it easy to move from other platforms to it, or vice versa, meaning clients aren’t tied to the platform, increasing their flexibility and responsiveness.
The offering also supports shared hosting, which seamlessly integrates with all major content management platforms, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
Charles Lalieu, managing executive for public cloud, says because BCX is building an “end-to-end ecosystem” clients “can go out and sell these services without having their own support facilities”.
“This marks the first time a major IT player that has traditionally focused on enterprises has offered these sorts of services to an open market using a channel model for distribution. BCX is now Africa’s first true cloud brokerage.
“It’s our vision to make things in Africa, for Africans, to meet African needs. With public cloud, we’re continuing to empower communities and make the impossible possible through technology,” he adds.
